LaRM days 163 (Future Bible Heroes-catch up)

Stephin Merritt's work is something of an acquired taste at the best of times (once you've acquired it, you get it hard though) and his gloomy camp disco side-project the Future Bible Heroes' records are the hardest to get to grips with.  It's all very arch, as with all of Merritt's projects, and although his gloomy wit is as sharp as ever and his voice as gleefully mordant there's something just too knowingly electronic and poppy about it all and for me too much of it falls flat when compared to his Magnetic Fields releases.  Debut album Memories of Love (1997) has, as ever, some superbly written songs ('Helpless' and 'Blond Adonis' are flawless pop songs) and Claudia Gonson's nicely disengaged vocals are, as in the Magnetic Fields, a nice counterpoint to Merritt's low groan of a voice.  Although a lot of the music is recorded on natural instruments, it's all processed to the nth degree and it all ends up sounding too much like a retro project glorifying the mid-1980's.  It's a great record, no mistake, but it just doesn't really rate particularly highly when put against the other stuff that Merritt was doing at the time. 

The interim Future Bible Heroes release was the 'I'm Lonely (And I Love It)' EP (1999) which is more of the same, with Merritt joyfully recanting any professions of love in favour of being miserable alone.  The other songs on the EP are a bit second rate for Merritt with 'My Blue Hawaii' and 'Cafe Hong Kong' showing him indulge his taste for cabaret songwriting and schtick too much for my taste, but 'Good Thing I Don't Have Any Feelings' is another good tune with some stereotypically witty lyrics.

The second album, Eternal Youth (2002), I think is a lot better than the other two records.  The arch, campness of it all is left to some of the lyrics rather than being shot through the whole sound, and in fact the majority of the record is rather openly gloomy.  I've always felt that although Merritt's lyrics have always been blackly funny and extremely witty, the overall feel that he and Gonson (and third Hero Christopher Ewen) are best at creating is rather a melancholy one, and although the Future Bible Heroes were supposed to be the fun, camp version of the Magnetic Fields, they still sound better when they tone it down.  'Losing Your Affection' is a great opener of a downbeat pop song, but it's deceptively upbeat when compared to the rest of the album.  For the most part it's actually composed of slow and stately electronic mood songs more than outright pop (although that still gets a look in with the Yazoo by way of Grace Jones 'I'm a Vampire' and   ) and it's those gracefully dour songs that work the best (a dark 'Thousand Lovers in One Day' is superb) and there are also some really nice scene setting instrumentals (suggesting that Ewen has a bigger part to play than ever in the band).  Interestingly though it's really down to Gonson that the album sounds the way it does, with her ever knowing but mutable voice leading almost every song on the album, with Merritt only providing the occasional dour vocal interlude, and it's her confidence in carrying these songs that really makes them.  Oh and, the final song on the album, the heart-grazingly romantic 'The World is a Disco Ball' is a truly moving bit of electronic pop music.

The first Futureheads album (2004) hasn't aged as well as they might have hoped and it's partly because they stuck too rigidly to the jerky guitars, stilted vocals and time-signature fiddling Drums & Wires era XTC as their model (which, although one of the greatest models there is, needs some changing to make it relevant) and although the album has loads of great songs ('Decent Days and Nights' is really good) and is still great fun to listen to it just hasn't got that little extra thing to lift it out of the mess of XTC rip-off merchants (Field Music for instance have found lots of way of fiddling with the format).  One of the selling points for the Futureheads was the complex vocal arrangements and harmonies, and they are often brilliant, but just as often manage only to over-complicate the sound.  It's telling that probably the most memorable thing on the album is the late addition of their angular punkification of Kate Bush's 'Hounds of Love', which although a great idea, done really well, undermines the rest of the original material on the record.

And I never felt the need to pick up any of the subsequent albums, but Wolfgang gave me a copy of this year's strictly a cappella sort-of-covers album Rant.  Well, where to begin with this?  Wolfy's view is that you should take it at face value and enjoy it as a kind of bar back-room vocal workout for fun, but I just hear what sounds like some terribly over-earnest teenagers trying out their rather embarrassing vocal chops.  Bearing in mind that the vocal interplay and arrangements have always been a selling point for the band I suppose it makes sense that they would do this, but without the instrumentation it reveals the fundamental problem with the a cappella approach - it's really basically very corny. I saw them do their appalling demolition job on Richard Thompson's heartbreaking 'Beeswing' at the end of Late Review a few weeks ago and unfortunately the recorded version is identical, stripping away any emotion and leaving this silly vocal jumping about.  And there's the problem right there, the whole album has the same feel, a bunch of musicians who don't know or care about the fact that songs are any good because of the emotion, the sense of connection in them.  Instead the Futureheads have ended up making a record that sounds like a group of X Factor semi-finalists have got together to make a vocal album, and I can't think of a worse insult than that (although to be fair, there's no way anybody on the X Factor would be doing versions of 'The Keeper', 'The Old Dun Cow' or 'Summer Is Icumen In', let alone 'No.1 Song in Heaven').

So that's it for the letter F, but of course we've got some stuff to catch up on before moving on to G, starting with this year's album by Allo Darlin' entitled Europe.  An improvement on the already exceedingly charming first album, Europe is less obviously indebted to the twee-pop world and has a much stronger sense of character and determination.  In other words the band have gone from being a charmingly unfocussed ramshackle jangle-pop oufit to being a really great guitar pop band.  The songs are a lovely mix of Henry's Dress US indie and the Heavenly UK version with Elizabeth Morris' idiosyncratically Australian outlook and there are some absolutely gorgeous songs here ('Tallulah' for instance, whose title references clear influences Tallulah Gosh and the Go-Betweens).  As far as gentle indie pop goes Europe is as good as it gets these days and although it never reaches the heights of some of its forebears, it's still an absolutely lovely record.

So, I made my admiration for the first two Bat for Lashes albums quite plain earlier, and it irks me to have to admit that I'm having trouble with the new one, The Haunted Man (2012).  Opener 'Lilies' is great, opening up with a tribute to This Mortal Coil's cover of 'Song to the Siren' with its washes of treated guitar (a lot of Natasha Khan's stuff has been cribbed from old 4AD records, but never so clearly), and it's a lovely song, with nice nods to Kate Bush as well as P.J. Harvey (people have made a lot of the lyrical similarities between The Haunted Man and Let England Shake, but I think they're overstated, the emotional friction seems to me to still be between men and women on The Haunted Man).  Things go slightly awry with the overblown and underwritten 'All Your Gold' which makes worrying moves towards vocal grandstanding, something which Khan has never needed to do because her voice is remarkable enough without it.  Again, we've got noises, notes and vocal phrasing cribbed from other records, but the goth Fleetwood Mac-isms that worked on 'Daniel' fall a bit flat this time out.  You know there's simply not right when you've got professional songwriters on board and the fact that the bloke who "co"-wrote Lana Del Ray's 'Video Games' gets a credit on The Haunted Man suggests nothing so much as the handing over of control by Khan to her record company and for such a singular talent that seems to me little short of criminal (the song in question, lead single 'Laura' sounds, well, would you believe it, a bit like 'Video Games').  There are still superb moments on The Haunted Man, but the decision to strip things back (also not necessarily anything other than a keeping-in-step ploy) doesn't work as far as I'm concerned.  When you're trading in esoteric nonsense, as Khan does, you're doing yourself a disservice by not making it as ornate as possible.  In other words, if you're playing Dungeons & Dragons, don't pretend that your character is an estate agent.  Incidentally everybody has something to say about the cover.  My own view is that it's really rather clever and thematically it's absolutely in line with her work generally and this album in particular.  The fact that it's a marketer's dream is probably not accidental.

Finally for this week is the most recent album by Australia's snotty pop-punk outfit Bleeding Knees Club, called Nothing To Do (2012).  It's bratty (in a lo-fi, fun sort of way - not in the Blink-182 utterly, utterly shit sort of way) and it races along ranting about girls, skateboards and scabs with some half-baked surf melodies and buzzy Johnny Ramone style guitars.  It isn't any good, obviously, and after it's over you wonder why you didn't listen to something better instead, but it's a decent bit of fun along the way.